The theory and practice of urban flood risk management has traditionally been dominated by the development and application of almost exclusively technological approaches to flood risk management, with only some minor ‘social aspects’ appended. This predominance has led to the development of less effective and less efficient means of minimising the detrimental effects of urban floods. It is now obvious that urban flood risk management requires multiple approaches and disciplines and this book is one of the first that brings into a synergic relation a range of aspects concerning both social and technical issues. It correspondingly offers alternative ways of constructing and framing urban flood risk management practice that have the potential to build not only structural but also social resilience.

This is the second book in a series of Urban Hydroinformatics books and it is concerned with the transformation of urban flood management culture from a ‘techno-economic’ one to a ‘socio-technical’ one, that is, one that extends the technical aspects into their more general social environments. The book examines different drivers of urban flood risks and it focuses on the way in which social and technical aspects are understood and introduced, from the planning and design stages of urban drainage assets, through their construction, operation and rehabilitation, to early warning and disaster risk management. It covers the flow of information that starts from the acquisition and analyses of various kinds of data, passes through the instantiation of numerical models and analyses of hazards and vulnerabilities, and ends within the decision making processes in which the current more traditional technical environments are transformed into more complete sociotechnical environments, with increasingly active stakeholder involvements that have the capacity, if properly executed, to provide states of social justice.

Although this book has been written mainly as a text book for post-graduate students who have a strong interest in Hydroinformatics as applied to urban flood risk management, it will also appeal to practising engineers and researchers who are involved in the processes of design, modelling and decision support, who will find it useful as a reference. The book uses examples from real-world case studies to support and demonstrate the key issues explained in the text. A DVD is available from UNESCO-IHE to complement the book and it contains exercise materials and video lectures given by the authors and other contributors.